Rachel, our babydoll, continues to explore and investigate everything that she can access. She has an insatiable curiousity about the world and her environment and is always, always on the go. We let her roam freely around the house (we follow her closely, of course) and she is allowed to touch and feel whatever she finds. This includes the dog's waterbowl as I've shown you before.

I passed her a plastic tub to compare against the ceramic dog bowl.

Babydoll loves to play games and learns very quickly - the other day I was carrying her and repeatedly making a sound from soft to loud that went something like, "Errrr...yah! Errrr...yah!" She followed right along and together, we found a rhythm immediately. It was a fun game and we were both chuckling and grinning at each other.

We also play a game where I roll a small ball towards her and she picks it up and throws it back in my direction. I was surprised that she could play this game, actually. I wasn't expecting her to throw the ball back to me but, as it turned out, this activity occupied us for quite a while. I should clarify that "quite a while" in Rachel's world means about a minute! That little lady is never still for long.

She has recently realised that there are a few other rooms in our home and she has expanded her explorations to suss them out. Here she is in our tiny kitchen, checking out the knobs on the oven.

We do have some electrical stuff out in the open (on the console for the TV and the related gadgets) and she does play near them. As I mentioned, an adult, if not two, is always with her, so she's never in any danger.

Actually, babydoll needs a lot of supervision because she is completely fearless. Here she is, standing on top of some CDs and yes, she got up there by herself.

Here, her right foot is on CDs which are in a box, her left foot is on CDs which are propped up on the mat. This girl is unstoppable. (I'm sitting next to her, just outside the frame.)

Babydoll loves straws. It is one of the "toys" I give her to keep her entertained during car rides.

Pulling wet wipes out of the box. She attacks tissue boxes as well. I'm sure most children do this, don't they? We let her carry on to her heart's content. After she's done, we just stuff everything back in.

Here she is with the other common child-magnet - the remote (in this case, the remote for the air-conditioner).

Babydoll likes to flip through books, whether they are paperbacks, board books or comics. Here she is fiddling with a board book. She had already ransacked Richard's stash of comics which you can see behind her.

As she is so curious, wherever there is action, you can count on her to make herself part of it. This bothers Ryan sometimes, especially when he's playing with his letters and numbers. He likes things to be neat and tidy and all sorted out. Babydoll comes along and everything gets messed up. Other times, they get along very well.

Playing with her brother's stuff, while her brother isn't looking.

A few mornings ago, babydoll was rummaging through Ryan's luggage (which I had not yet unpacked after our staycation). She flipped open the luggage (which was unzipped), reached in and grabbed an item, pulled out the item and put the flap back down. Then she flipped the flap open again and repeated the steps. I grabbed my camera to film her but by the time I got it, she had already moved on to play with something else, being satisfied that she had mastered the skills needed for that activity.

I did not show her how to do any of that, so I was pretty impressed. It was interesting to see her so focused and going through the steps systematically and repeatedly till she was satisfied that she had mastered what she set out to do. It was like watching her do a Montessori Practical Life activity!

Another shot of the cheeky girl. This time, she's ransacking the bookshelf.

The bookshelf is just opposite our staircase and, after pulling out some books, babydoll turned around and decided to crawl up the stairs!

She initially brought some reading material for her adventure but after the first few steps, she realised that crawling up the stairs was fun enough, so she chucked the book aside.

She made it upstairs all on her own and was mighty pleased with herself. I was pleased too because we managed to get it on video! That was on Friday, 5 April, and since then, she's crawled up a few times. Here's the video!